status: withdrawn (2007-07-10)
keywords: I/O
This SRFI specifies an extension to the R5RS ports that supports several useful features: binary I/O and text I/O, bulk I/O, file opening attributes, and bidirectional ports. Binary I/O is provided through byte ports which are ports whose fundamental I/O unit is an 8 bit byte. Because characters can be encoded with bytes using a character encoding such as ISO 8859-1, UTF-8, and UTF-16BE, any byte port is also a character port (a port that supports the character level I/O of R5RS). A byte port's character encoding and various other attributes are specified when the port is opened. Because reasonable defaults exist, these attributes are specified using a named optional parameter syntax. All procedures which have the same name as in R5RS are compatible with R5RS but may provide additional functionality.